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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27073780">like altars</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tavina/pseuds/Tavina'>Tavina</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Naruto</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Background Original Uchiha Characters, Depression, F/M, Grief and Trauma, Hopeful Ending, Madara does not like Emotions, Mito would prefer to bang Madara like a screen door, Uchiha Izuna (Deceased), Uchiha Madara Has Issues, Uchiha Madara Needs a Hug, Uchiha Madara-centric, Unreliable Narrator, but this is primarily a story about healing, somewhat dark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-09 01:02:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>10,068</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27073780</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tavina/pseuds/Tavina</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>For all that she claims to be an open book, Mito is mysterious — alpine cheekbones, the eyes of a mourner, a mouth that suggests both the tenderness of a mother and the cruelty of the sea.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Senju Hashirama &amp; Uchiha Madara, Uchiha Madara/Uzumaki Mito</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>60</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Fic In A Box, Restless Wonders</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>like altars</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/gifts">Senri</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is something at once both similar to what I normally write and not at all similar, but I am very fond of it, and I hope it brings great enjoyment.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Those lovers are mostly gone. My hands remain — : like altars.”</p><p>— Natalie Diaz, <em>The Hand Has Twenty-Seven Bones</em></p>
<hr/><p>Mito Uzumaki leans on the other side of the conference table, the dark fall of her hair like blood. For all that she claims to be an open book, Mito is mysterious — alpine cheekbones, the eyes of a mourner, a mouth that suggests both the tenderness of a mother and the cruelty of the sea.</p><p>Hashirama has long since left, off to beam at children and plant fields, and Mito had waved Tobirama out the door not two minutes ago with a tinkling laugh and something of a jest made more in mischief than in fun.</p><p>Mito Uzumaki.</p><p>Mito of Uzushio.</p><p>Mito who had introduced herself as “from over the waves and under the waves and of the many faced sun,” though that made no sense whatsoever.</p><p>She’d arrived with the sealmasters of the barrier team, the only obvious woman among them, and taken up residence in the hastily constructed Senju Clan Compound on the opposite side of the bank from his clan, and somehow made herself a fixture in the city planning discussion.</p><p>Less than a year since Izuna’s death, and here he sits, casting about for something to fixate on rather than the grief of losing one final brother.</p><p>“Well?” he asks, after another moment of her calmly tapping her fingers against the vines curling about the table — Hashirama’s work — her pensive face cut in sharp relief in the golden afternoon light. “Isn’t it time for you to get going doing whatever it is you do otherwise?”</p><p>She smiles at this, perfectly painted on features moving without a trace shred of sincerity, one finely plucked brow arching. “You know what I do, Madara-o.”</p><p><em>Drive me to distraction. </em>“Not interested.” What the fuck sort of statement was that? In any case, it wasn’t like he could take it back. Instead, he pushes his seat back and rises to go.</p><p>She laughs, the sound sultry and golden in the springtime heat. “Do I really frighten you that much?” She swings her ankles back and forth, the swish of the silk, the swish of her hair, the room suddenly feels claustrophobic, the walls leaning in, the light distorting.</p><p>He has to leave.</p><p>“The great Madara Uchiha,” she drawls, affecting the accent of coastal sailors, fishermen, and pirates. “Demon on the battlefield, pride of the Uchiha clan, frightened of a little woman?”</p><p>“I’m not scared of you,” he snarls, and suddenly they are face to face, a scant inch between their noses, though he barely recognizes when he’s moved across the room. “I could snap your neck like a twig.”</p><p>Somehow, it’s less claustrophobic up close.</p><p>Her mournful eyes light up with mirth, fathomless like the deep. “Like a cornered animal,” she says, and takes the wind from his rage. “I only wanted to ask you a question.”</p><p>He does not deign to respond to this.</p><p>“Why did you do it?” she asks, back to contemplation, soft voice loud in the empty room. “Why did you agree to peace?”</p><p>“Who told you to ask that? Your father?”</p><p>No, the king across the waves on his islands of peace and plenty could play his long game for all Madara cared. He wants nothing of that overripe fruit.</p><p>“So mistrustful,” she pouts, but that is fake too. There is not an inch of her that is real. “Is it so hard to believe that it is my own curiosity?”</p><p>She reaches across the space between them, twirls a lock of his hair around her fingers, and he is numbed by the ice in the air.</p><p>“I’ll trust you when one of us is dead.”</p><p>He pulls himself away, as if coming unglued, but her laughter follows him, all the way across the village like the haunt of a siren’s tune.</p>
<hr/><p>The next time they meet, it is only glancingly. He had gone to market, to fetch salt, a new handle for his scythe, and to find a piece of leather for a new harness for his hawks, and on the other side, he hears the sound of Hashirama’s booming laughter, turns to find her on his arm, with a smile that crinkles the corners of her eyes, for once, entirely genuine.</p><p>And like embers to a flame, he burns in the idea of joy — long lacking.</p><p>When had joy last passed his way?</p><p>Longer than he remembers.</p><p>There has long been no joy to be had in the house of his father, only the grueling turn of years, each year less plentiful than the last, as though there were a blight upon the land, forcing them to move.</p><p>Closer.</p><p>Farther.</p><p>Father.</p><p>And death had followed, year after year.</p><p>Like slowly boiling a frog to death in water, one death is acceptable, so is another.</p><p>A life lost here. A life lost there.</p><p>Another. Another. Another.</p><p>Until Izuna had died and the whole house of cards had come tumbling down.</p><p>And he breathes out.</p><p>And he breathes in.</p><p>And there is nothing but empty space, like canyons and rushing river waters.</p><p>“Madara-sama?”</p><p>It is Kaiko, coming in to tend to the hearth, deal with the cooking, likely to mend his clothing and wash his laundry as well, but whatever she did, she was like a shadow in the house, silent unless she is spoken to.</p><p>And he doesn’t do much speaking these days, having used up all his words at the council table, until all he tastes is smoke and ash.</p><p>She’d grown frightened of him lately, shying away from him when he passes, but she has not yet abandoned her position.</p><p>But then, the ties of blood bind them, and once upon a time he’d been her favorite cousin.</p><p>“Yes?” he says, still tapping his fingers against the kitchen table, sake tokkuri in his reach but he’d rid himself of wine cups long ago.</p><p>These days, drinking straight from the bottle isn’t as frowned upon without Izuna to frown upon him.</p><p>“The Senju,” she says and looks down and away. “They wear on you.”</p><p>It is not <em>Senju </em>that has driven him to drink this time, but admitting that Mito Uzumaki made him hot beneath the collar and dunked him in the winter sea at the same time is too unfathomably foolish for him to ever mention.</p><p>He hums some sort of vague agreement and turns away. “It shouldn’t.” He shrugs, languid, considering another drink. “I was the one to agree to the terms of peace.”</p><p>Peace.</p><p>Another word that brings ash to his throat these days.</p><p>Peace.</p><p>All the lies to make peace go round.</p><p>“They wear on all of us,” Kaiko says, voice still very soft, but without the same stinging barbs Mito’s softness provoked. “And you most of all, and for that I am sorry.”</p><p>He hums, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Tobirama’s chest would look better smashed in with a gunbai, if only it wouldn’t make Hashirama <em>sad. </em></p><p>On the table, his hand twitches, as if completely divorced from his control.</p><p>When he looks in her direction, she is watching him, a smile sad and soft on her lips, dark eyes tender like the doe he’d seen last spring, a fall of black hair pulled back loosely into a braid.</p><p>But there is distance here, like the tide rolling out, the water of goodwill depleting in the ever growing drought.</p><p>Soon, any tenderness will starve itself out in the cradle.</p><p>The clan does not care much for him these days, having taken what little fruit there is of peace, but not the hope or compassion for other people that he had wished them to.</p><p>But then, he, himself, can model neither hope nor compassion.</p><p>Perhaps that is why she turns away, back to the wood fire crackling in the stove, tending to it with her good hand, three fingers of her right taken by the frost when she was a child.</p><p>He used to be her favorite cousin.</p><p>Maybe that’s why she still stays when there’s nothing left of the boy who’d once held her hand as the medic took her fingers off and held her again as she cried, no longer able to sew as neatly as she did before.</p><p>He downs another drink.</p><p>When he wakes the next morning it is in bed, with the blanket drawn up about his shoulders and his boots and socks laid neatly out on the mat by the doorway, and he feels guilt for his inability to name what is wrong with him.</p>
<hr/><p>Summer bursts with blossoms, dry and hot, the sun scorching in the daytime, and Hashirama is often busy, tending to the rice paddies, singing to the rice, which leaves him to deal with Mito and Tobirama, both of whom horrify and distract him — only in different ways, Tobirama’s eyes hard and glittering like stars, Mito’s mournful and fathomless as the sea — but Tanabata comes and with it the summer festival.</p><p>As village founder, as one who leads the Uchiha clan, as one of the signers of a peace treaty that now kept over a thousand people together in uneasy distrust of each other, he must go.</p><p>But that doesn’t mean he has to be happy about it.</p><p>He dresses in black — black haori, black hakama, edged in dark blue, the Uchiwa embroidered on his back the only thing that lends this outfit any color — and resigns himself to festivity he does not feel and colors too bright for him and the twilight world he used to know.</p><p>Izuna's eyes had lent him new sight, brighter colors, light in the world instead of shadows, but he has long since grown unused to looking at such things.</p><p>They'd buried his eyes with Izuna, but the eyes in his skull means that his brother will wander, a ghost, lost and hungry, not buried whole.</p><p>They'd buried his eyes with Izuna, and when he dies he too will wander the world as penance for a gift he never should've accepted.</p><p>This is how he weights the scales, his borrowed time in which he might find something in this world worth saving.</p><p>Whatever it is, it will not be him.</p><p>He brushes past another stand, the scent of roasted meat wafting in the air, drifting aimlessly, errant as the wind.</p><p>There’s streamers and dancers, fire shaping, the Senju had brought out tiny koi in buckets, paper folded into all sorts of shapes, and men and women of all ages dressed for peace.</p><p>Dressed for peace in body, but not in mind, for few of his clan mix with the Senju, and the divide is not east and west as it is typically when they live on opposite banks of the river, but pockets here and there, young men and women entirely of one clan or another.</p><p>It is too soon for friendship, and his own willingness to speak to and listen to Hashirama since boyhood had been marked out as different.</p><p>But he had been well loved among his people, once upon a time. Well loved despite his weakness, as Hashirama still is.</p><p>But then, Hashirama had not committed cardinal sin, had not sentenced <em>his </em>brother to wander, even after death, even without a next life, and thus still deserved the love he bore and gave unfiltered.</p><p>“Madara!” An arm is thrown over his shoulders, lined with scars, but still strong, Hashirama’s smile vibrant as ever. “I haven’t seen you in many days, though the rice has certainly grown well in that time.”</p><p>He finds his lips pulled upwards despite himself, a spark of warmth igniting where there’d been none before. “I hear you sing to the rice.”</p><p>Hashirama laughs. “Would you believe me if I said they grow better that way?”</p><p>“Not a chance.” He snorts, but more in fondness than dismissal, and Hashirama pulls him along, an arm still over his shoulders.</p><p>“I haven’t seen you for so long, and you look…” Hashirama trails off as he actually looks at him.</p><p>A corner of his mouth pulls down in sardonicism. “Unwell?” He pulls away a little to pat Hashirama on the back. “You may thank your intransigent pig headed little bother for the loveliness of my sleepless nights.”</p><p>“He is not a little bother.” Hashirama wilts impressively. “He is a large bother.”</p><p>He makes a face. “Call it a gentle understatement.”</p><p>At the negotiation table, Tobirama gives nothing away for free, offering and counter offering, each word, each clause weighed with the miserly conduct of an accountant — except what they wager for is not gold or banknotes, not rice or hemp, not even family heirlooms or secret jutsu.</p><p>No, they wager drops of blood and human lives.</p><p>And the lives of family members on either side are not free to spend.</p><p>“I will talk to him.” Hashirama sighs. “Life taught him to be harsh, and he has not yet learned that it can be kind as well.”</p><p><em>Where did you get that idea? </em>He almost wants to ask. <em>Who made you believe that life can be kind? </em></p><p>But he does not ask. Instead, he almost laughs, “I won’t hold my breath, but thank you.” <em>Thank you. </em></p><p>
  <em>You do see the best of us all. </em>
</p><p>Hashirama continues on his way, dragged away by some cousin or other, and he continues wandering through the festivities, a three foot bubble around him in all directions where no one else dared to tread.</p><p>Across the square, music starts playing, Senju on one side, Uchiha on the other, and the dances begin.</p><p>He watches them, suddenly filled with memories, unnamed and unspoken, and closes his eyes for a moment.</p><p>Just a moment.</p><p>His ears, at least, are still his own.</p><p>The music is familiar, upbeat, with strains of wistfulness that he has heard around Senju campfires from before the time they stopped lighting fires in fear of Uchiha retaliation.</p><p>A small hand catches his elbow. “Do you dance, Madara-o?”</p><p>Mourner’s eyes, raw like the wine dark winter’s sea.</p><p>He used to dance.</p><p>“What’s it to you if I do or don’t?”</p><p>She is dressed in festival clothing today, pale blue embroidered with gold butterflies, hair done up with seals dangling in the light afternoon breeze, a cascade of little bronze bells falling from her hair.</p><p>She laughs, bells tinkling. “I’ll try a better question.” Her hand finds his own, and they lock fingers as if made to hold hands. “Will you dance with me?”</p><p>His dreams had been plagued with her in recent nights anyway, memories etched in sharp relief even without the sharingan.</p><p>What’s a few more images?</p><p>“Only because you ask so nicely.”</p><p>They line up with the other couples, all young and fresh faced and tender hearted, lovers all, amid the parting sea — on one side, Senju, on the other side Uchiha, and here they are, Uchiha and Uzumaki, for the moment uncaring of it all.</p>
<hr/><p>“You said he was only a small bother.” Hashirama drains the cup and stares at it despondently before pouring himself another. “But while I wasn’t looking he seems to have gotten all of these odd ideas from someplace and I don’t know how to make him put them down.”</p><p>“Are you sure he has to put them down?” He swirls the wine in his own cup around, contemplating the idea of drinking straight from the bottle.</p><p>Surely, no one would frown upon him putting his lips on the thing, even if this is a public establishment.</p><p>For one, shinobi of their calibre do not get <em>drunk </em>so much as they get non-sober.</p><p>For another, Hashirama is in his own despair too much to notice.</p><p>Tobirama, though, openly disdains how much Hashirama loves him.</p><p>Which, is only the logical option.</p><p>The Uchiha and the Senju have been alike in warfare and embittered hatred for generations now. Trusting someone who had scarred the self healing man the likes of which the Senju haven’t seen for centuries is a fool’s errand.</p><p>And yet, Hashirama had done it and continues to do it still.</p><p>“He is only being logical, Hashirama, you know this.”</p><p>By his side, Hashirama groans, throwing his head back, tanned skin gleaming bronze in the light. “His logic doesn’t make any sense.”</p><p>The work of a moment to slit his throat, the work of two to take his head in two hands and snap his neck, but they are no longer at war, and he need not attempt it.</p><p>There is nothing to make him attempt it any longer, and he wonders when he will be able to put this down.</p><p>All this bloodlust, the sin, the rust, the <em>pain. </em></p><p>“It doesn’t?” he raises an eyebrow, wonders, incredulously, where Hashirama’s goodwill <em>ends. </em>“I’m sorry, violence between our clans is not some idle myth.”</p><p>It has been a year now, since last summer, when the treaty was signed.</p><p>And the threat of violence makes even little children concerned. Enough that they stay at home and no longer fill the streets as they hesitantly did in those early days.</p><p>“I’m aware it isn’t,” Hashirama says, sober, gentle, more perceptive than Madara had thought of him. “But nothing ventured is nothing gained.” And Hashirama smiles, fishtail wrinkles crinkling the corners of his eyes. “If I do not trust you, how will you ever trust me?”</p><p>And suddenly Madara is <em>aware. </em></p><p>
  <em>He knows what I was thinking.</em>
</p><p>His face flames as he looks away, once more, taking advantage of a good man’s generosity. “I wouldn’t have actually done it.”</p><p>He’d once told his father that he would rather draw a knife across his own throat first, and that had broken his father’s heart (and Tajima Uchiha’s trust, but they do not speak of that).</p><p>He did not mean for it to change.</p><p>“I trust you not to.” Hashirama’s eyes are fond. “But trust is not so easy for us all, is it?”</p><p>He’ll toast to that.</p><p>“What did you two disagree on this time?”</p><p>For Hashirama and Tobirama disagreed on everything, even more so than Tobirama and himself. He could almost like the man if Izuna hadn’t died under his sword.</p><p>“Oh, only who ought to lead the village.”</p><p>“And you didn’t consult me?” The idea that the topic had come up, not at the negotiating table, but here at the drinking table does not sit well with him.</p><p>“There was no consensus reached,” Hashirama downs another cup. “He just wanted me to lead, and I deferred it.”</p><p>
  <em>You deferred it. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>For what? </em>
</p><p>But he does not learn the answer to that.</p><p>Instead, Hashirama beams and sentimentally turns to some other topic. “Say,” he picks up his cup and holds it out to Madara. “Mito-chan really is something, isn’t she?” There is a fond light in Hashirama’s eyes, both amused and proud. “The barrier seals she designed are a work of genius.” Laughingly, his best friend shakes his head. “The gods know I don’t have even half of her brains.”</p><p>If the mood of the evening takes a downturn after that, as he thinks of the color of Mito Uzumaki’s hair, of the teasing half cruel smile on her lips, the way she sees too much of him and prods at him with words that are not quite cruel but also not quite kind, can anyone blame him?</p>
<hr/><p>The trio of messengers from the Nara-Yamanaka-Akimichi alliance approach slowly, from the west.</p><p>Which means that they are escorted into the center of the village and the negotiating table shortly, where all four of them are gathered, even Hashirama who had washed the mud from his bare feet, which he hid under the table, and his hands, which he rested lightly on the wood, vines writhing all about them.</p><p>The Yamanaka pales upon seeing such a display of power, but the Akimichi — a portly man — takes a seat in the wooden chair and sets his own hands on the table, a gesture of goodwill.</p><p>Hashirama beams at him.</p><p>“I am Chomitsu Akimichi, and the other members of my team, Shikatsune Nara and Inoyasu Yamanaka.” The Akimichi gestures to each of the shinobi behind him in turn. “As you may be aware, we come to extend an invitation from His Imperial Majesty to join him for the harvest time celebrations in the capital.”</p><p>It is not a question, but Tobirama and Hashirama both look confused.</p><p>Mito hides her smile behind her fan, looking up at the visiting party with an innocent regard. “His Majesty does?” she asks, gently excited, the way courtly ladies are. He knows this isn’t real. She is no courtly lady, being more vicious than the summer sun, and just as beguiling and deceptive as coriaria berries. “When does he expect us?”</p><p>“Two weeks time.”</p><p>Mito casts her eyes down, lashes long against her painted porcelain face. “We look forward to seeing him.”</p><p>The Akimichi chuckles. “As His Imperial Majesty looks forward to meeting both Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha.”</p><p>The three shinobi vanish much more quickly than they had come, evidently the Nara and the Yamanaka only there as backup for the Akimichi should the meeting go sour as meetings between clan representatives often do.</p><p>“What does the civilian daimyo want with us?” Tobirama wonders aloud. “We are hardly a threat to him, a powder keg about to explode, as we are, in no small part because of the violations of property lines by the Uchiha.”</p><p>“Only because your folk can’t keep to their side of the river,” he snaps back.</p><p>Tobirama opens his mouth to say something, but is interrupted.</p><p>“He wants your fealty.” Mito taps her fingers against the side of her face, lazily snapping her fan open and closed. “Before this peace he had no need for it — your better warriors were tied up in killing each other and neither clan posed a threat.”</p><p>And she looks at the wars with an outsider’s eyes, someone who has lived in peace and plenty all her life, so of course she would speak of it so casually, but all three men in the room bristle to some degree, and the fiery embers of <em>hurt </em>over Izuna’s death flare again.</p><p>He breathes out.</p><p>He breathes in.</p><p>And he keeps on breathing.</p><p>“Yes,” he says after a time. “This is about fealty.”</p><p>The Uchiha had been a noble clan of importance long ago, in the old stories, courtiers and bodyguards to daimyo and princes and princesses.</p><p>Before the endless war, they had been people of some note, and though that is in the distant past, they had retained a little of the knowledge of civilian treachery.</p><p>The civilian man who holds court on his throne of lies has seen something he wants out of this fragile village, and he will stop at nothing to receive what he wants.</p><p>Mito tilts her head to the side, her hair a soft fall of blood. “Just so.” She considers things for another moment, tapping her folded fan against her other hand. “Tobira-bou should stay behind, but I shall travel with the two of you, and whichever woman you select to bring with you, Madara-o.” She smiles, lips writhing like snakes, a cruelty lighting up her eyes. “They so rarely expect the barbs of shinobi women after all.”</p><p>And so it was decided, the details bargained with of course, and his own post at the council table accounted for with one of his sterner cousins, Setsuna would be a good choice, so that Tobirama will not run roughshod over his clan while he is gone, but it is decided, by and at large by Mito Uzumaki.</p>
<hr/><p>He had been to the daimyo’s court, only once, in passing the year he turned fifteen, running a message for a nobleman to the Lord Prime Minister and dodging Senju attackers along the way.</p><p>He had not been presented in the front hall where His Majesty held court then.</p><p>Kaiko follows him still, silent as a shadow, without word or question, his companion to the capital when he had asked.</p><p>So it is that the four of them are presented, in the front hall, dressed in travelling clothes.</p><p>He bows low, the appropriate amount for a man he holds no allegiance to and yet rules his country.</p><p>“Bansai,” he rumbles, taking care to keep his voice soft, Kaiko’s right hand on his arm so as to not draw attention to her deformity. Here, among the too gently kept pigeons, it might startle. “May you live a thousand years, Fujiwara-heika.”</p><p>“Rise,” the old man on the throne has a thin, reedy voice, but clear eyes. “Let me see your face.”</p><p>He does so, turning his eyes up to the pomp and circumstance.</p><p>“The demon, Madara Uchiha.” The daimyo has shrewd eyes, as if weighing every pound of flesh, every ryo, and giving nothing away of the assessment. “And yet still so young.”</p><p>“War is only for the young.” He concedes this. “It does not linger for the aged.”</p><p>War reaps with an indiscriminatory scythe.</p><p>Old men and young boys marching to war only means that the clan has nothing left.</p><p>And yet, old men and green boys <em>had </em>gone, had fought, had died.</p><p>And so too, it had been the same on the side of the Senju. No fires had starved them of cooked food, raw boot leather eaten in the winter as snow fell thickly all around, no warmth to be had.</p><p>He had not meant for it to kill, not in that fashion, but it had.</p><p>And that is the price he must carry, the penance he must bear.</p><p>They are dismissed to a suite of apartments too lavishly furnished to truly live in and useless for anything except impressing guests.</p><p>But later that night, there will be a banquet, in which they will all be reintroduced with their best clothes and wined and dined before the civilian asks them to kneel.</p><p>And kneel they will, but only after conditions and concessions of their own.</p><p>One does not bargain away the lives of over a thousand people without <em>something </em>to show for it.</p><p>It is only a matter of how much and how easy.</p><p>He has spoken with Hashirama, and he is sure that Tobirama must’ve as well before they left.</p><p>A cautionary tale or two, why the Uchiha clan had fallen into warfare with the Senju, how the noble titles had been lost.</p><p>The time and time again when civilians had cheated or betrayed them, the number of times Uchiha and Senju had been hired by rival factions, all the old records dug up.</p><p>They’d been brothers once, many generations ago.</p><p>Perhaps, this next generation, or their children’s generation will be brothers and sisters once more.</p><p>Only time could tell what sort of future they’d be able to barter for the children who come of age with their new and fragile peace.</p>
<hr/><p>Kaiko is silent for a moment, but he had bid her to speak, knowing that she often saw more than she would say. “Whosoever wins Mito Uzumaki will become Hokage.” Her admission is still quiet, but firm, like the last guard before a group of children.</p><p>It is not a hero’s death they die, but a martyr’s, and Kaiko has stood as the last defense enough times to know when to use the martyr’s tongue.</p><p>He considers it, considers the way Mito had cruised among the noblemen and women tonight, delighting, scandalizing, soothing, captivating, and swaying them all at once, like a shark in the water, like one of those brightly colored poisonous ocean creatures.</p><p>He considers the way they bent towards her, even the daimyo charmed by her bell laugh and bright eyed innocence.</p><p>But he remembers Mito, what slight depth she had allowed him to perceive in between all these months of negotiation and governance, that she has the eyes of a mourner, boundless as the sea, and that while she had shown her brighter, tender side tonight, she has cruelty bound up in the depths of her.</p><p>Like painted on colors and delicate prettiness, not much of her is real.</p><p>But she had won the nobles over, had sung so sweet a tune that they could not help but follow the piper. Fealty they may have sworn, but the price had been lighter than he’d feared, the fight far shorter.</p><p>Whoever wins Mito Uzumaki will win Konoha, the long and short of it plain.</p><p>“This fight has already been won.” He admits this, because he has seen Mito and Hashirama walking arm in arm among the rice fields in the summer evening, too far away to hear their chatter, but not far enough to not see how they both smiled, joy between them infectious. “Hashirama has won her already.”</p><p>Kaiko draws a sharp breath and turns away. “He will not lead as you have,” she says, floating across the room on feet lighter than a ghost’s. “He neither loves nor understands us as you do.”</p><p>He breathes out. “My love has been in short supply these days.”</p><p>He knows every clan member by name, knows the family they belong to, the pains and sufferings they bear.</p><p>But his frozen heart can find little love.</p><p>“I am content to wait.” She raises her eyes to his. “For when your flame returns to join us, as are many. But we would be less content to let the Senju rule us.”</p><p>The words linger between them the entire night.</p><p>And even as he lies there in the dark, listening to the sound of his own breathing, unholy loud in the silence, he cannot forget it.</p>
<hr/><p>He calls Setsuna into his study to talk of what had occurred while he was gone, brings out the sake and lays a table of fried dough twists and other fanciful items Kaiko had made him earlier in the day in preparation for Setsuna’s visit, but his cousin is apprehensive.</p><p>So it has come to this, his hospitality not quite <em>rebuffed, </em>but certainly examined and doubted.</p><p>If it was polite to laugh dementedly at such a spectacle, he would have, but it is not, so he settles for a slight huff. “What ails you, Setsuna? Do you no longer find me pleasant now that Izuna is gone?”</p><p>An expression crosses Setsuna’s face, one that he can neither place nor name, though he files it away for later.</p><p>For the moment, they are both disturbed by the sound of footsteps.</p><p>“Madara-sama!” Etsuji-kun nearly trips over the doorframe to find him, Kaiko’s only child has her wide eyed tenderness, somehow still believing that he hung the stars at night. “Did you hear about the news?”</p><p>“‘Tsuji-kun,” Setsuna laughs from his place at the opposite side of the table. “Slow down, Madara-sama has guests.”</p><p>The appearance of one eight year old boy, and the tension bleeds out of the room like a neck wound, in short, shallow gasps.</p><p>“But it’s important?” Etsuji-kun turns to him. “Madara-sama, tell Setsuna-san that this is important.”</p><p>“I’ll be the judge of that.” He reaches out and gently tousels the boy’s hair. “What news?”</p><p>Tsuji beams. “I heard it from Riko-neechan, who heard it from Fuka-baa, who heard it from Hiroji-niisan, who overheard it from a <em>Senju</em>” and here Tsuji makes a face “that the Hyuuga are on the move again.”</p><p>The bottom drops out of his stomach.</p><p>If the Hyuuga are moving again, the only thing they want is war.</p><p>And if war comes to them, if war does come, does it come for Tsuji, only eight years old?</p><p>Does it come for Kaiko, with only one good hand?</p><p>Hiroji, lame in one leg?</p><p>If war does come, does it wash away this frail peace barely out of its infancy with a tide of blood?</p><p>“That is indeed,” and he can barely speak for the lump in his throat, sudden grief thick enough in the air to choke on, cloying scent sweet with death. “Very important.”</p><p>The attitude around the table has changed again, Setsuna sitting straighter now.</p><p>Tsuji scampers off, likely to spread the bad news further, but he slumps forward, the ache in his skull suddenly unbearable. “Give me a moment,” he manages. “Just a moment.”</p><p><em>If this be betrayal, then let it taste sweet, </em>he thinks, almost desperately.</p><p>If Hashirama’s unhappiness is the price he must pay for the sake of no more war—</p><p>Could he do it?</p><p>But then, if the clan’s safety depended on him being a sinner — and he had never been a saint — then he will sin.</p><p>If it must be betrayal…</p><p>Then he will live with the smoke in his lungs for the rest of his life.</p><p>The tone of his conversation with Setsuna changes after that.</p>
<hr/><p>Hashirama elects to send Tobirama with a contingent of Senju clansmen north to treat with the Hyuuga. Blood has already been spilled there as the Hyuuga press into the lands of smaller clans, ones that had sought no protection from Konoha’s leadership, or its name, but likely could not buffer the might of such a large clan suddenly on the move once again.</p><p>And while he could disagree or offer to send his own clansmen north with Tobirama to present a seemingly united front, he doubts that such a thing would do more good than harm.</p><p>Tobirama’s distaste for Uchiha is well known.</p><p>No one would like to work with Tobirama, so he does not mention it.</p><p>In many things, Tobirama does not listen to his older brother.</p><p>But in this, he merely looks around the table once with grim certainty, a scowl affixed to his face, and bows his head. “If that is the wish of everyone else, then I head north with twenty men.”</p><p>“I wish you the best, Tobira-bou.” Mito presses a quick kiss to his cheek, leaving behind a perfect red outline of her lips. “Take Mikasa-kun with you. He is one of the best among us, and can lend no small amount of aid.”</p><p>“I will remember.” Tobirama closes his eyes for a moment, preparing for what is to come, a moment suddenly vulnerable enough that Madara remembers that he is a man four years younger than himself, who has seen his own share of war and death and suffering.</p><p>But Tobirama’s frosted eyes snap open, and with a sharp nod, he leaves.</p><p>Hashirama crumples against the table, his face in his hands. “I hope he stays safe.”</p><p>“He is no fool.” Madara manages that, at the very least. “He will do his best to persuade the Hyuuga, but if that fails, he will not perish in the attempt.” <em>Unlike you, </em>he does not add, because that would help nothing.</p><p>Mito goes to set her hands on Hashirama’s shoulders, whispers something soft he does not catch, and his best friend brightens. “You’re right, Mi-chan,” he says, attempting a smile, though it wobbles. “That’s just what I’ll do!”</p><p>And as though a storm about to wreak havoc on some other thing, Hashirama is gone.</p><p>Once more, it is only himself and Mito in the room, and the walls lean in to listen.</p><p>“What did you say to him?” he asks, more bemused than horrified. No, if he must sin, and he has decided that he <em>shall, </em>then might as well dip himself in black entirely. What point would there be in dipping a toe into the pool of sin and expect it not to travel upwards in his blood, rotting him from the inside out?</p><p>No, if he must sin, let him sin completely to the end.</p><p>Mito shrugs, silk rustling over her shoulder. “Only the truth, Madara-o.” She turns to him, with a smile like an otter, curious and half fond, though otters are feral creatures with sharp teeth and eat meat and cannot be trusted.</p><p>“I wasn’t aware that the truth made people happy.” Rarely does truth bring joy to <em>him, </em>and he has seen plenty of the aftereffects of truth none of them particularly joyful.</p><p>But Hashirama had brightened upon hearing it.</p><p>She laughs, the seals in her blood colored hair swinging back and forth. “It can, but not the way you say it.”</p><p>“How ought I say it?” He keeps his voice light, almost teasing.</p><p>Once upon a time, he'd been a man that women swooned over.</p><p>Once upon a time.</p><p>She turns to him, an air he cannot name about her, light filtering through her hair. “As though it were not a burden.”</p><p>The walls lean in, but he lets them. “And how does one do that?”</p><p>She considers it, one hand against her perfectly painted face. “Oh, I don’t think that would suit you.” She rises from her seat and turns to go. “You’d have to admit to having <em>emotions.</em>”</p><p>And if that did not baffle, nothing else would.</p><p>“It’s gotten colder out.” he says and rises as well. “I’ll walk you back.”</p><p>And for a moment, all her dark eyes say is surprise before she hides it away behind the surface of the sea. “I appreciate it, Madara-o.”</p><p>The touch of her small hand on his arm burns like the winter’s chill, but there is satisfaction to it.</p>
<hr/><p>The missive comes for him, from Hiroji’s hand after Tobirama has already returned, peace talks not entirely successful, but enough concession granted that there will likely be no trouble for some time yet.</p><p>The spring has already begun to thaw, marking over a year since the contingent from Uzu had arrived, many of them also <em>returned. </em></p><p>But not Mito.</p><p>Setsuna had left as part of a nobleman’s guard, four other clan members with him.</p><p>The missive comes for him with Hiroji’s limp, as he ponders the difference between war and peace, as he thinks of the children born this past year, the young men who had not died, the fields planted and harvested without fear of the trees on the edges of clearings, on the other side of the river woodsmoke curling over the tree line.</p><p>Peace has come for them then, sneaking in on silent feet. On the other side of the river, the Senju light fires again, no longer apprehensive about what he’d do to them.</p><p>No trust offered, none gained.</p><p>The missive comes for him, dried with blood and dripping with rain, until pink runs rivets down Hiroji’s wrist, penned with Setsuna’s hand.</p><p>He does not read it.</p><p>The blood is enough.</p><p>He looks up into Hiroji’s face, so young and yet already lined and weathered with worry, and reads the confirmation there in his second cousin’s eyes.</p><p>Setsuna will not come home.</p><p>The missive comes for him, here at the table with others watching, and it is the only thing that comes for him.</p><p>“The others?” his throat closes in upon him, the sudden sound of rain on the roof a roar.</p><p>Hiroji looks away. “I’m sorry Madara-sama.”</p><p>Little Kagetaka with the cowlick, only seventeen.</p><p>Ikuo, who had coughed all winter and recovered just a week before Setsuna had called on him to go.</p><p>Michiko, who had laughed in his face last Tanabata.</p><p>Saburo, who’d often sat smoking on his front stoop all through the harvest last autumn.</p><p>Setsuna, bright eyed and fleet footed, the last living — no longer living — of his boyhood friends.</p><p>No one will be coming home.</p><p>His throat closes.</p><p>Abruptly, he rises, pushing Hiroji’s proffered hands aside, making his excuses, stumbling towards the door.</p><p>Outside in the rain, his chest dry heaves against his will. The chill of the water cuts straight down to the bone.</p><p>What a fool he’d been, to think that there could ever be <em>peace, </em>that there could be land free of death and suffering.</p><p>Outside in the rain, he crumples to his knees, a howl in his unclogged throat, hair plastered to his face.</p><p>Someone’s hands grasp at his elbows, the rain stopping in a bubble of space around him.</p><p>The broken sound in his throat does not stop.</p><p>Someone drags him to his feet through strength alone, mud caking his legs below the knee, his hands, his face.</p><p>He half expects it to be Hiroji, but Hiroji does not have this sort of strength.</p><p>Hashirama then, though the hands are too small for that.</p><p>“Madara,” a woman’s voice, arms holding him, blue silk and embroidered bronze leaves, a weight between his shoulder blades as if she rests her head there, the rain diverted by the oil paper umbrella she clasps with the cord about her wrist. “Madara.”</p><p>The keening in his throat stops, and he gasps as though choking on it.</p><p>Mito Uzumaki takes him home, catching his elbow when he stumbles, umbrella above them to keep out the rain.</p>
<hr/><p>The air still crackles with errant tension by the time he changes and ties back his still dripping hair.</p><p>She turns to him when he enters but says nothing.</p><p>He has not felt so buried while still alive before.</p><p>He has never wanted more to be alive, to be breathing, to be more than this hollow shell of a man.</p><p>“So the truth is that instead,” she says, without any real judgement.</p><p>He laughs bitterly. “That I am a flame who has gone out?”</p><p>“Not out,” she says and comes to stand before him, a hand cupping his face. “If you’d burned out you would not look at me with such hunger.”</p><p>The corners of his mouth tilt down, and he almost laughs again. “What is it you hope to do? Relight a broken fire?”</p><p>“I hope to try.” And it is back again, that look in her mourner’s eyes — the one that perhaps, in a different time, he would have named <em>tender. </em></p><p>He had not expected anyone with her name to look at him so.</p><p>She stands there after the last shred of fabric had pooled to the floor, without shame, and reaches forward to tug at the belt at his waist.</p><p>And he wraps his hands in the locks of her hair, inwardly thrilled by the thickness of it, pulls her down so he could kiss her, her teeth harsh against his bottom lip.</p><p>Bloody and raw, but he has lost the taste for sweetness long ago.</p><p>If there is anything left, it is the desire, for one moment at least, to feel the spark of being alive.</p><p>She lolls her head to one side, offers him her neck, her breath warm against his face, and he plants a kiss there, on her pulse, greedy, insistent, as though she were wine, as though she were salvation, as though she were real, but she is not real.</p><p>Not in the ways that matter.</p><p>In the morning, there will be a wake planned, the corpse in his front parlor laid out as is befitting of an Uchiha, burned before it — heavens — could decompose, and he would taste the rotten taste of charred flesh hitting the back of his throat, and bear it with silence.</p><p>In the morning.</p><p>But tonight there is this, the cant of her hips against his own. “Madara,” she says, with a voice insistent like the moon on the tide. “I want you to fuck me.”</p><p>He laughs at this, jagged, broken, and made of desperate fire, smoke charred lungs already despite the funeral not happening yet. “Aren’t we getting there?”</p><p>Where he’d kissed her is slowly purpling beneath the first layer of skin he had not broken.</p><p>Whatever there is waiting for them in the morning, one thing has been lost already.</p><p>Hashirama’s goodwill starved out in the lack of oxygen in his throat.</p><p>“No.” She pulls back, takes his chin in her hands and tilts his face up until they are eye to eye, her mourner’s eyes, wide and deathless as the sea. “You,” she says, leaning close, other hand splayed against his chest, “you are thinking of other people. And I do not settle for that.”</p><p>“Oh?” He arches a brow, a hand of his own on the small of her back.</p><p>“I come second to no one and nothing,” she croons, breath warm against his neck, marking him as he had marked her.</p><p>If only for the night.</p><p>If only for the single transitory moment between a spark lit and flickering out.</p><p>He spans her hips with his hands, her lips leaving red paint on his chest.</p><p>Someone wants her back, someone might love her better—</p><p>Someone. Someone. Someone.</p><p>Nothing matters except the white space where she kisses him, suddenly warmer than he’s been in years, the shocked huff when he flips them over, the tangle of hair in the candlelight, her hands on his shoulder blades curled tight.</p><p>Perhaps this is what she’d meant by the water of the grave.</p><p>She is water, and here they are, this bed a grave.</p><p>“And will he not know?” he asks, wonders if this is worship or if it is sin, if a good man’s face would crumple with the knowledge.</p><p>
  <em>Whosoever wins Mito Uzumaki wins Konoha. </em>
</p><p>But is this winning?</p><p>“Who do you mean?” She rises, bare skin glistening golden toned in the candle light, pulls him closer, laughing. “Cold feet?”</p><p>“Your lover,” he drawls, pulled between opposite poles, attraction and guilt.</p><p>But tonight, the attraction will win, and guilt will set in with the bleeding light of the dawn. “Hashirama.”</p><p>She laughs then, a sharp and tender thing, takes him in her hand and bares her teeth. "Foolish man," she sighs. "I love him, but he is hardly what you think he is."</p><p>Desire pools low in him, a dark and rumbling thing, and in that moment he feels animated and alive. "What is he then?" He half chokes. "If not your lover?"</p><p>"Why must you think of him so?" She asks him teasingly, still stroking him with merciless rhythm. "For tonight," she leans closer and kisses him, almost sweet, the way that lovers kiss, but that isn't real either. "Just for tonight, won't you think of me?"</p><p>And it is that <em>permission </em>that makes him lose his mind.</p><p>Softly, he takes her face in his hands, brushing her hair back, the way that lovers do. "Mito," he says, almost reverent, almost fond, Izuna's eyes preserving this moment for all eternity. "Mito," and it is almost a croon, "Mito, Mito, Mito," a song of her name. "You are the only one I will ever think of again."</p><p>It is a lie of course, spun sugar and pretty, but she seems to ignore it.</p><p>At least for tonight.</p>
<hr/><p>Guilt comes, as it does, with the morning light.</p><p>But not as much as he expected.</p><p>It’d been a choice to kiss her.</p><p>It’d been her choice to pick him up, to come home with him, to stay.</p><p>Why she has chosen thus he does not know and does not ask. Some things ought to stay as they are, unknowable if only because if so, there is no truth to them.</p><p>“Mmm.” She is still half sprawled over him, her red hair like a river, one long braid he’d watched her do through half closed eyes the night before though he had pretended that he didn’t, candlelight spilling over her skin and bare shoulders — her hair red gold, her skin porcelain gold.</p><p>“I have to go.”</p><p>And so he does.</p><p>And so he does.</p><p>For already, in the east there is the faint trace of the dawn, the lightening sky casting its disapproving face upon the world.</p><p>“So you do.” She yawns, an arm still thrown over him. “Must I as well?”</p><p>“No.” The word rises unbidden, surprisingly firm in the fragile light. “I will not tell you what you must do.”</p><p>She cracks an eye open to look at him, a smile more amused than fond on her lips. “No longer thinking of snapping my neck like a twig, Madara-o?”</p><p>“I wish you wouldn’t say such things.” He rises to begin dressing for the day. A funeral outfit and a festival outfit really didn’t have too much difference to him these days. All black is all he wears. “Is it not enough that I remember saying that to you?”</p><p>In the cold light of morning, Setsuna is still dead.</p><p>And Hashirama’s trust is broken.</p>
<hr/><p>It becomes a pastime, the red woman in his life, in his bed, at the council table. If Hashirama notices — <em>he has to have noticed </em>— he says nothing. For someone as emotional and prone to outbursts as Hashirama, the silence is temperamental and unusual.</p><p>But Hashirama talks of buildings and harvests, of possible alliances with the Hatake and Inuzuka, or smaller clans like the Sarutobi or the Nohara.</p><p>Positive things, celebrating that their two clans are no longer at war.</p><p>It is Tobirama’s gaze that lingers on him, weighing and judging by degrees, frost in the other man’s dark eyes.</p><p>If he had been a more superstitious man, he would’ve said that Hashirama’s little brother epitomized winter — hair like snow, eyes like frost.</p><p>Madara wonders, briefly without lingering, if walking with Mito’s hand on his arm meant that she has publicly declared an alliance, or indeed, what her clansmen and <em>Hashirama’s</em> clansmen thought of her now, in her association with him.</p><p>If this be betrayal, let it at least, be betrayal with dignity.</p><p>Not that he has much of it.</p><p>Before or after this whole affair.</p><p>The invitation to go drinking from Tobirama sits on his table and <em>mocks </em>him however.</p><p>Such activities are born of sociability and fondness.</p><p>He cares to neither be <em>sociable </em>with Tobirama nor does he have any fondness for the man.</p><p>But he has already pulled Mito’s attention away from Hashirama — <em>you slept with her, you lout, </em>a voice suspiciously like his late brother’s creeps in to give commentary, <em>and you keep sleeping with her even if it makes you feel guilty — </em>so presumably he is supposed to listen to whatever Tobirama wants to say to him over drinks.</p><p>It’s not as if this is a dueling challenge for a fight to the death.</p><p>He sighs, picking up the invitation card to look at it again.</p><p>Perfectly polite. Of course. Senju Tobirama often is. A careful man who clipped every unnecessary word out of his speech and abided by the formality and logic of a situation could never help to be unfailingly polite.</p><p>Then again, it’s unclear if Tobirama’s soul lived past age seven — he certainly didn’t <em>act </em>like a man who had one.</p><p>On the other side of the room, Kaiko pauses, glances at him, and averts her eyes.</p><p>“Senju Tobirama has invited me to go out drinking with him,” he drawls, the card hanging loosely from his fingertips. “Do you think I should go?”</p><p>She pauses for a moment. For all that his kinsmen do not find any fondness in their hearts for Hashirama, despite the man’s own bleeding heart and attempts at friendliness, they find even less for Hashirama’s wintry younger brother.</p><p>“What does he want to say that he cannot say at the meeting table?” Kaiko asks, a frown working itself onto her face, hands curled around her broom.</p><p>“I haven’t the faintest idea.” He rises from the table, card slipping from his grip onto the table. “I suppose I will find out.”</p><p>He tarries upon the thought of it if only because he owes Tobirama <em>nothing, </em>but long has he blinded himself to the reality of events, snipping at Tobirama but never confronting, wounds still rubbed too raw with the sting of it.</p><p>If this be the time for <em>truth, </em>well then let it be truth between them.</p>
<hr/><p>It is almost dark outside by the time he makes it inside the bar, though the spring buds burst with blooms in the waning light.</p><p>Tobirama is alone in a corner, having already ordered wine, and a variety of dishes as of yet unsampled.</p><p>“Rudeness is not a virtue you know,” Tobirama says, looking down into his wine cup.</p><p>The corners of his mouth twitch. “Who said I was the rude one?” He takes a seat on the other side of the table.</p><p>“The food’s gone cold.” Tobirama takes a sip of his wine, watching him from over the rim of the cup.</p><p>“You didn’t even ask if I could clear my schedule.” He picks up the chopsticks on his side of the table. “Isn’t that also rude?”</p><p>“Lovely,” Tobirama mutters to himself, not the least bit drunk yet. “I love it when you suddenly start picking at semantics despite not caring about them.”</p><p>“What, can’t win when I’m trying?” Traditional drinking fare is laid out on the table — chahan, fried fish, stir fried greens — probably already paid for if it’s Tobirama who ordered them.</p><p>He wonders what the purpose of this conversation really is.</p><p>Tobirama does nothing without purpose, but rarely does he have the ability to divine what the other man’s purpose <em>is. </em></p><p>Tobirama makes a face at him, picks up his bowl of cold rice and starts adding food to it.</p><p>“Did you forget which side of the table is yours?” Watching the other man add food <em>to his bowl </em>before sliding it back across the table to him seems like something out of another universe.</p><p>“Hardly,” Tobirama mutters, filling his own bowl now. “It is only what I am supposed to be doing.”</p><p>He stares at the food on the table and wonders what turn exactly has befallen his life now. “What you are supposed to be doing.”</p><p>“Yes,” Tobirama says while grimly pouring himself another cup of wine. “Since you are marrying Mito-jushi, I assume that makes you my elder in this family.” Tobirama drains his cup and starts pouring himself yet another cup. “That is what younger members of a family do for their elders isn’t it?”</p><p>Suddenly, the way that Hashirama spoke of Mito Uzumaki starts to make sense.</p><p>Hashirama calls her ‘Mito-chan,’ a smile and laugh reserved for a younger relative.</p><p>Tobirama calls her ‘Mito-jushi,’ as the proper address for a younger cousin to an elder one.</p><p>And she, by turns, calls them Hashirama-kun and Tobirama-bou.</p><p>He’d asked her about —</p><p>His face flames.</p><p>“Well,” Tobirama says, ill tempered and no longer completely sober. “I didn’t poison the food so you might as well not pass up a free meal.”</p><p>“You killed my brother.” He picks up his chopsticks.</p><p>Izuna’s ashes had been scattered to the wind, like their mother, their father, two of their elder brothers and one younger brother.</p><p>Like innumerable cousins and other relatives.</p><p>His clan do not keep to graves. Whatever grief or worship they did, it is in the things they carry.</p><p>“And sometimes I wonder if I should’ve killed you when I had the chance.” There is less heat in this statement than there could’ve been.</p><p>“And I should’ve throttled you at the first opportunity.” He picks up his bowl to prod at the greens and boneless piece of fish. It would be just his luck to choke on it, and he doubts that Tobirama would attempt to help him. “You know why I don’t.”</p><p>Tobirama grunts.</p><p>But they both know it.</p><p>What kept the separated shattered parts of this village together, the central axle upon which all their relationships spin.</p><p>Hashirama, with his bleeding heart and kind smiles, too trusting by half and somehow effortless.</p><p>They might be leaders, some of the best fighters of their generation, smarter, more practical, more prone to realism, and yet, it is Hashirama with the strength to dream for all of them.</p><p>They sit in silence after that, no more words exchanged.</p>
<hr/><p>Hashirama is awarded the position Hokage by the Daimyo at the start of summer, a scroll in flowery language, loaded too heavily with implication.</p><p>And he resents that it nearly sends them back to war, his clansmen enraged and angry by the meddling some fancy civilian man from far away has done with their lives.</p><p>Or, indeed, that that civilian man would openly promote a Senju instead of one of their own.</p><p>It’d taken conversation to quell the rage in the wake of so recent a grief, Hikaku not the only one nearly in tears by the end of the night.</p><p>Conversation.</p><p>Cajoling.</p><p>Threats.</p><p>His promise that he would not <em>kneel</em>, not to Hashirama at any rate, had stayed slaughter, even if that meant he had to swallow the bile in his throat.</p><p>Another piece of identity bartered for the sake of peace.</p><p>How many more?</p><p>He has no answers to that question and that is what frightens him more than anything else.</p><p>Once, long ago, his father had held his hands after his second brother’s ashes had been blown away in the wind, in that time before Hashirama, before he had broken his father’s heart and said —</p><p>
  <em>I will one day leave the lives of our family members to your protection. You will have to be strong when the day comes, ‘dara-kun. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Remember this my son: </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Tradition is not the worship of ashes…</em>
</p><p>“But the preservation of fire,” he mutters, staring out across the river.</p><p>It does not look as wide as it did when he was a child, skipping stones across it for the first time.</p><p>If it is fire he must preserve, and ashes he must discard, then…</p><p>Then, in the change of the seasons there is the slow crumble of mountains washing out to sea, rivers changing course, fires burning out and reigniting, wind that stops and starts.</p><p>In the change of the seasons, there is a winter that will arrive, but there is a second spring, a second summer, a cycle instead of a straight road into eternity.</p><p>Perhaps this is what Izuna meant when he asked him to live instead of merely survive.</p>
<hr/><p>It has come to the end of summer now, soon frosts will appear spreading over Fire Country, rice all laden heavy, Hashirama singing as he had been last year.</p><p>He and Mito sit on the porch together, her head on his lap. Vixen that she is, her fingers trace the line of his jaw, a motion she makes in fondness that he can finally see.</p><p>“Why did you do it?” she asks, soft. “I was so worried—”</p><p>“That I would go mad?” He raises a brow at her, more in amusement than judgement. Perhaps a year ago, he would have. “Or that I would be too proud to accept such an outcome?”</p><p>“You never struck me as someone who would take the idea with grace.” Her fingers pause on the beat of his pulse. Her sleeve has fallen down the length of her arm, lilac silk pooling about her elbow.</p><p>In the afternoon light, the silver lines of her scars appear, pointed like the urchins that stung her when she was five, jagged like the rocks that had broken her skiff when she was seventeen, crooked like the fire that had burned her the first time she came to the mainland at age twenty.</p><p>The stories of a life that she has lived, daughter of a king in a land of peace, but yet still not easy.</p><p>“Why did I do it,” he muses, mind drawn back to Tsuji, who has just turned nine. “For the children.” He had not grown up in a time of peace.</p><p>These past three years have been, not unmarred, but better than it has been for <em>so long. </em></p><p>There are families that have started to heal, the sound of children laughing, a district slowly coming to life.</p><p>They are becoming a settled people.</p><p>“So that they may laugh.” He sighs. “So that they may heal.” <em>As I never could and never will. </em></p><p>The world has lightened a little bit in recent times, colors no longer too bright and too intense, but he will never be a child again, never walk the banks of a river in peace with his brothers, never be able to play Go with Setsuna or hear his father speak to him again.</p><p>But perhaps, this is a different sort of healing.</p><p>“What is peace worth to you?” She had asked him this once, nearly two years ago, and it had read like a challenge.</p><p>Now, it only reads as tenderness.</p><p>“Everything.”</p><p>And the clouds continue on their way across the sky.</p><p>The sunlight is warm.</p><p>And beneath his feet, the earth is stable, solid.</p><p>A good place to build a home.</p>
<hr/><p>“Hold him gently in your hands.</p><p>He has been cracked enough</p><p>as it is,</p><p>and his heart is more</p><p>shattered than he lets on.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Many thanks to the amazing beta for this work, who currently remains nameless for Anon Period, for her wonderful encouragement, unbridled enthusiasm, and delightful commentary. </p><p>In regards to the quotes found in this fic, "Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire" is attributed to Gustav Mahler, the Austrian Bohemian composer. The ending quote I found on tumblr to a dead end without being able to find the original person who wrote it.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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